History Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description

History is often used as a generic term for information about the past, such as in "geologic history of the Earth." When used as the name of a field of study, history refers to the study and interpretation of the record of human societies.
The term history comes from the Greek historia, "an account of one's inquiries," and shares that etymology with the English word story.

Historians use many types of sources, including written or printed records, interviews (oral history), and archaeology. Different approaches may be more common in some periods than others, and the study of history has its fads and fashions (see historiography). The events that occurred prior to human records are known as prehistory.

Although a certain amount of bias in history studies is inescapable, national bias being probably the most important, history can also be studied from a narrow ideological perspective, perhaps one that the practitioners feel is usually ignored. For example:

A form of historical speculation known commonly as virtual history (also called "counterfactual history") been adopted by some historians as a means of assessing and exploring the possible outcomes if certain events had not occurred or had occurred in a different way to that which they did. This is somewhat similar to the alternative history genre in fiction.